Eugene Gordon (November 23, 1891 – March 18, 1974) was a journalist, editor, fiction writer, World War I officer, and social activist.
He published some fiction under pseudonyms, using Egor Don (which combines his first initial and last name) and (more rarely) Clark Hall and Frank Lynn.
He grew up in Hawkinsville, Georgia[1] and was raised in New Orleans, where he later recalled living through the Robert Charles riots.
Gordon writes about the challenges of growing up[1] in the South in the short story "Southern Boyhood Nightmares".
At Howard, he met his first wife Edythe Mae Chapman, a prominent writer and poet during the Harlem Renaissance.
And during the mid-1920s, he began publishing an annual series, "Survey of the Negro Press," in which he offered his selection for the best newspaper of the year, and also listed his choices for such categories as excellence in reporting, and best feature writing.
Its founding members included fellow writers Helene Johnson and Dorothy West, and Gordon served as its president.
Out of this grew an annual literary magazine, Saturday Evening Quill, which Gordon edited during its brief existence from 1928 to 1930.
[7][8] By the 1950s, Gordon had joined the staff of the radical leftist weekly National Guardian, for which he reported on the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was an important step in the development of the Non-Aligned Movement.
[2] When Gordon died in 1974, Henry Winston—then the chairman of the American Communist Party—praised him as "a dedicated partisan in the fight on many fronts for Democracy and Socialism.
Some men saw the war as an opportunity to improve race relations by fighting for America, while Black veterans, like Gordon, were not granted the respect they hoped for.
Gordon cites The Chicago Defender as the blueprint for this homogenized style of newspaper and compares its publisher, Robert S. Abbott, to William Randolph Hearst.
He goes on to rank publications such as The Chicago Defender, Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier according to news, editorials, features, and appearance.